where orders emerge

Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 203 of Robert Higgs’s 2004 volume, Against Leviathan (footnotes and court-case citations deleted):

In the war emergency that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the government built an awesome command economy, suspending many individual rights. As Clinton Rossiter noted, “Of all the time-honored Anglo-Saxon liberties, the freedom of contract took the worst beating in the war.” Ten million men were conscripted. The Supreme Court refused even to review challenges to the constitutionality of the draft. Some 112,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens and not one of them proved guilty of a crime, were herded into concentration camps, losing their liberty and sustaining property losses estimated at some $400 million. All quite constitutional, said the justices. Government orders allocated raw materials and plants; the government seized and operated production facilities and sometimes entire industries; and government officially rationed many consumer goods. None of these actions elicited so much as a ruling from the Supreme Court.